Colonial Maritime Defence and Piracy in North America

In October 1717, Governor Walter Hamilton of the Leeward Islands reported to the Board of Trade that pirates who had formerly been impacting Caribbean trade had “all gon[e] to north america, or to some other parts”. This report coincided with the peak of pirate activity in North America, when pirates voyaged from New Providence and the Caribbean to the North American coast. Arriving in the summer and autumn months of 1717 and 1718, pirates targeted capes near to colonial ports for a short period, intercepting vessels before moving northward to the next chokepoint. They then returned to the Caribbean at the end of autumn to avoid the winter storms, before returning in spring. Throughout 1717 and 1718, there were frequent complaints of pirates operating in the capes and inlets off South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, with attacks reported as far as Cape Sables in Newfoundland. While the number of vessels plundered by pirates in North America was relatively small over the duration of these two years, the short-term concentration of piratical attacks within colonial capes had an intermittent yet significant impact on regional trade. This, in turn, encouraged a number of local initiatives intended to chase pirates from nearby waters. The success of British anti-piracy expeditions in North America in 1718, particularly against Edward Thache in North Carolina and Stede Bonnet in South Carolina, has ensured their inclusion in most studies of Atlantic piracy. Yet, these discussions provide little consideration of the organisation, funding and motivations behind these voyages, and do not consider what they suggest about the state of maritime defence in early eighteenth-century British North America. Instead, these expeditions are viewed as a turning point in a unified imperial project to curtail piracy throughout the British Atlantic. This aligns to the wider historiography of the British Atlantic, in which colonial maritime defence – including that provided by the Royal Navy – has received little focus beyond wartime privateering or naval assaults. Unlike British Caribbean colonies, which had largely been absorbed into royal control, British colonies settled along the eastern coast of North America continued to be made up of an assortment of royal and private colonies.

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